Color: Paint color guru Eve Ashcraft can help

Palette Paralysis?

The Right Color: Finding the Perfect Palette for Every Room in Your House, by Eve Ashcraft, Artisan Books, 218 pages, $29.95

By Janet Reynolds/Life@Home

If the go-to paint color for your home is shades of white because you are paralyzed by all the hues in the marketplace, worry no more. Color consultant Eve Ashcraft has a new book, The Right Color, Find the Perfect Palette for Every Room in Your House, that can help you move beyond whiter shades of pale.

While Ashcraft may not be a household name in your home — yet — she is the person other experts go to for help. She helped Martha Stewart — Martha Stewart! — create the line of paint that is inspired by the various blues found in her chickens’ eggs. She also chose the right white for the wall behind Steve Martin’s art collection. And that’s just a very short list of the rich and famous she has helped.

On the phone, though, Ashcraft is not a name-dropper. Nor is she hoity-toity. She speaks articulately and passionately about color but in a way that makes sense rather than makes it sound like a science whose code only a few people can crack.

The Right Color reads the same way. She offers straightforward steps for how to discover your home’s palette, including suggestions for where to find inspiration, such as a favorite piece of art or a particular souvenir. She talks about the importance of color in context. Is the room filled with windows and natural light that will change during the day? That can influence what color and what shade of a color is ultimately chosen, for instance.

A neutral palette can be a real clunker in poorly lit spaces or rooms with no interesting features. If you are new to taking risks with color, spend time looking in books and magazines for pictures of similarly sized and decorated rooms or try painting the back wall of a bookcase as shown here in an unexpected color. (Photo by Fritz von der Schulenburg)

In The Right Color, Ashcraft also talks of how color can define space through accent walls, say, or by providing pop in a particular piece of furniture. Having provided some rules, she, of course, gives tips on how to break them.

Sightlines are important as well. “Some people want a blue room, a red room, and an orange room,” she says. “Really? Okay, I can do that, but we need to make it make sense somehow.”

Her small apartment is an example. From her living room, Ashcraft says she can see the bedroom and the kitchen. She has a tiny connecting hallway that she has painted cayenne red. “That would be way too big anywhere else in my apartment,” she says, “but it’s fun to look at from my living room. It’s a great thing to see.”

To illustrate her points — and create a serious itch to grab a paint brush and a bunch of those sample jars from the hardware store and get painting! — are photos of killer rooms and pieces of furniture with colors to die for. Ashcraft ends her book with 28 colors that work, along with simple combinations of how you might use them with other colors. The names — Clove, Sky, Vapor, Tide, Frond and Tulip are a few — derive from nature and imply in their very simplicity that choosing the right paint is something you, too, can decode. They are also the names of the new line of paint she is selling through Fine Paints of Europe.

The names of colors, indeed, are a critical part of the psychology of paint, Ashcraft says. She noticed this early in her consulting career when she would suggest painting a wall green and the client would ask, “What kind of green?” A client, meanwhile, may “hate” pink, but is fine with a paint called salmon, a shade that we all know is quite pink in hue. “Part of it is just tuning into the fact that language is how people enter color, how they define it,” she says. “I can change their perception of what they are looking at not by changing the color but by changing the language. A lot of times if I detect a real language sensitivity, I will use only numbers because every color has a number. That can take some of the association out of it.”

Choosing earthbound names for her first line of paints, then, was deliberate. “I just wanted something really basic,” Ashcraft says, ticking off names such as Salt and Hay.

Fabrics can be a great source of color and inspiration. While the large stenciled border at the top of this bedroom is not an exact replica of the bedcover, it acts beautifully as a close reference. (Photo by William Abranowicz/Art + Commerce)

Except for the color she has named Dog’s Ear, which is in the gray family of hues. It’s an homage to the British company, Farrow & Ball, which has cheeky color names such as Mouse’s Back and Dead Salmon. “Leave it to the Brits,” she laughs, noting the Dead Salmon color actually refers to an 18th century term. Dead was a kind of oil used to make paint less shiny. “But who in the modern world knows that?”

Ashcraft is happy some color trends have evaporated. “I still have a problem with that teal color from the ‘80s,” she says, noting she recently saw it in the San Francisco airport tied in with a magenta color. “I was like, ‘really?’” she says. “It brings to mind a bad tracksuit. If that all just blew off the face of the map, I would be so happy.”

She is seeing some happy trends in color right now. First, people are getting away from variations of white and are more interested in using color, period.

“I have a lot of clients, (whose) idea of color was white, off white and the friends of those colors. ‘Don’t over-stimulate me, I have a busy life,’” she says. “Now they are more interested in color. ‘How do I do it?’”

And clients are interested in trying brighter colors. “I’m seeing a lot of bright yellow around,” Ashcraft says, adding that she’s seeing brighter colors in home décor accessories, which then also influences room colors. “West Elm and CB2 have more colorful stuff while a few years ago it was more monochromatic.”

Want to know more about color trends? Read our story on the “colors of 2012.”